“Koyunbaba” is a piece by the somewhat nutty and eccentric Italian composer Carlo Domeniconi, who moved to Turkey and became obsessed with it, trying to find ways to make the guitar echo its music, and its culture. Like “Asturias,” this is another piece that just blew my mind when I first heard it (also like “Asturias,” real players tend to make fun of it because it’s overplayed, and because every student goes through a “phase” where they have to learn to play it). It’s really quite fast (160 bpm), and consists of quite rapidly moving patterns that all “pull off” into open strings that drone in the background. The overall effect is, also like “Asturias,” somewhat heavy metal. It just tears along for the first 2 minutes and 39 seconds, before beginning a tremolo section that appears, if anything, even faster, and is even more “heavy metal” than before. It then returns to the fast arpeggios before ending in a slow, contemplative register.

It’s all technique, this piece. The tremolo section (around 2:40), for instance, is all very fast triplets on the lowest strings, punctuated by chords that you play on top—that’s very unusual for a guitar (tremolo is normally played on the highest strings), a bit like when a piano player crosses hands. But the most important technique in this piece is scordatura (literally “unstringing” in Italian). String players occasionally re-tune a string in order to play a particular piece. The “dropped-D tuning” is the most common on the classical guitar, where—usually for a piece in D major or minor—the low E string is dropped down to a D. On this album, “Cançó,” “Acalanto,” “Italiana,” “Royal Plum Pudding,” “Falling Leaves” and “Santa Cruz” are all in a dropped D tuning, while “El noi de la mare” is in a more rare dropped G (the A string is tuned down to a G). Very rarely, two strings are changed—but regardless, the tricky thin is to remember that the fret that you used to press to get, say, a G# is now giving you an F#, so if you want that G#, you have to play two frets higher.

I’m very comfortable playing in drop-D, and hardly ever make mistakes. It’s like shifting from a manual transmission back to a stick—you say, “right, right, gotta remember to put the clutch in when stopping.” But what happens if you re-tune all the strings? This is what Koyunbaba does, tuning the normally tuned guitar (EADGBE) to (C#G#C#G#C#E) or (DADADF). In order to make the piece playable, the sheet music gives the notes that you are supposed to play on one staff, and the notes that you think you’d be playing if you were playing a normally tuned guitar on a second staff—and that’s the staff that you read, playing stuff that looks like nonsense on the page, but that actually makes beautiful music. That’s scordatura—writing notes for the re-tuned instruments as if it were in standard tuning. Is your mind blown?